Co-production "Symposium" by Elisabeth Tambwe

Symposium starts at the other end. In reversals, through back entrances, dusty stories that were thought to have been forgotten and repressed memories about bodies and language find their way into a borderless and hybrid theatre/auditorium. Catatonically, stuttering, symptomatically, masturbating, haltingly, in the West and the Rest what has been stored unconsciously empties itself, pointing to traces of colonial violence, registered traumas of diaspora communities between the past and the present.

Symposium, by Elisabeth B. Tambwe, is based on the overcoming of barriers between different artistic practices with the incorporation of post-colonial political aspects. Using movement, sound, video and text passages, her performance explores the relationship between ethnocentrism and exclusion, socio-cultural affiliations and historiography that is always subject to ideological distortions.

Symposium is committed dance theatre that does not separate thinking from feeling, uses ironic and provocative humour to comment on the disastrous state of world events, in that the political questioning through the vocabulary of the choreography inconspicuously incorporates the spectators as part of a constantly re-scheduled but never achievable conciliation symposium – illustrative of the illusory promises that lose themselves in a brutal and absurd reality, in which at best self-gratification offers a glimmer of home.

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